He was lost in thought for a few minutes; then he said, "It can be managed. The maid-servant will not be at home to-day as it is Sunday; but the porter's wife, who keeps the key, knows me, and if you like----" Lilly demurred a little to intruding into a stranger's flat, but Herr Dehnicke overruled her scruples, hailed a cab, and they drove to a westerly quarter of the town, where the houses looked more imposing and the people more distinguished, and where stately chestnuts shading velvety green turf flanked the blue waters of a canal. "Oh, happy people to live here!" she exclaimed, and then the carriage drew up at the corner of the Koenigin-Augusta-Ufer. Dehnicke jumped out and said a few words at the window of the lodge. A key was handed out, and they ascended the carved oak staircase, which was covered with a thick cherry-coloured carpet. How different from the stone flights of steps which led up to Frau Laue's, and were painful to the feet! He paused on the second floor, pulled the bell as a matter of politeness--for it might happen that the maidservant was at home after all--and then, when no one came, put the key in the door and turned it. Lilly tried to read the name that was engraved on an oval porcelain door-plate, but in the dusk that prevailed on the landing she could not distinguish it. They entered a very dark little hall smelling of fresh paint, and passed into a carpeted room, on the walls of which were cupboards with glass doors curtained with green silk. The rest of the furniture consisted merely of two armchairs, a few small gilt chairs, and a round, brightly polished dining-table. "This has been used as a dining-room," said Herr Dehnicke; "but it would do very well for your private studio and showroom." Lilly agreed, though she would rather have contradicted him. Opening out of the dining-room on the right was a bedroom, with Rose du Barri chintz hangings, a pink enamelled suite, and a canopied bed with a billowy silk eider-down quilt, and curtains fastened with an old-gold seven-pointed coronet. "Is your customer nobly born?" asked Lilly, feeling vaguely envious. "I wasn't aware of it," he answered; "but it's possible she may be." Lilly sighed a little, recalling her own ivory toilette treasures and her coronet-embroidered underwear lying in Frau Laue's fusty drawers; how beautifully they would fit in here! She inhaled with rapture the delicate lilac fragrance that pervaded the whole room like an aristocratic spring, and, shuddering, she compared it with that plebeian smell which, no matter how indefatigably she aired the Dresden treasures, invaded them with deadly persistency. "Happy woman!" said Lilly in a low voice. She rather wondered that the occupant of the flat had left no trace of herself behind--no ribbon, peignoir, or trinket. "She must have locked up everything, or taken it all away with her," suggested Dehnicke.